


Taking Her Stand

by FancifulRivers



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: AU, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Flu Epidemic, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Apocalypse, Superflu
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 13:39:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3070253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FancifulRivers/pseuds/FancifulRivers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liza wants nothing to do with Flagg or Mother Abagail. She might not get a choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking Her Stand

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer-Sadly, I own none of this.

The dark man haunts her nightmares and the old woman strums her guitar through her dreams, but for Polly Elizabeth Martin, most recently of Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, she doesn't want to follow either of them. They promise darkness and danger, being caught up in something bigger than herself, bigger than everyone. If she was a character in a movie, she'd jump at the chance, she'd pile on her ten-speed bike with the playing cards still haphazardly slung through the spokes and take her chances, make her choice, a backpack draped across both shoulders and the wind fluttering her hair.

This isn't Hollywood, though, and Polly Elizabeth, Polly to her parents and Liza to her friends, stays right here, thank you very much. The streets are too congested and the stench of death too rank for her to stay in her own home, but she buries her family in the backyard one grisly summer evening that she never wants to think about again, sleeps deeply and dreamlessly through to the next night, and then opens up the road atlas and lets a stray finger decide her next destination. It's barely more than a dot on the map, and its name is Stokes.

She brings everything important to her, resigning the rest of it to decay and time, and pedals away, her feet working furiously and her mouth drawn back in a frozen snarl so that she can't let herself cry. She has a pistol in the small of her back, and it's lucky that she took a gun safety course last summer for work, or she'd be fucked. She knows better than to trust survivors. The superflu might be over, but humanity still stinks. 

Stokes is tiny, even smaller than its breadth on the atlas suggests, and the streets are almost entirely deserted. Liza lets the bike coast to a stop against a curb, her feet barely brushing the cracked pavement. It looks like everyone tried to leave before Captain Trips could sneak up on them, but it hadn't worked. A man in a white doctor's coat and bright red converse sneakers lies face-down on the grass a few doors down, in front of what looks like a library. The wind ruffles his hair, but she knows he's dead. She knows the look by now.

The supermarket bakes under the hot midday sun, and Liza bikes there next, parking her ten-speed against a lamp-post and letting her fingers stray to the small of her back a few too many times. She feels tight and prickly, like her skin is rumpled up over her bones. It's like she's being watched, but by nothing living.

The glass doors are shattered and as Liza walks through, she can hear broken glass shatter and crumble beneath the soles of her hiking boots. It reminds her of fallen leaves in the fall, and she wonders briefly if she will live that long. The stack of shopping baskets is still there, albeit crooked, and a strange sense of deja vu clings to her as she lifts the top one free, gathering up its handles in her right hand.

Unlike her hometown, this supermarket is not picked clean. Oh, sure, the perishables are pretty much gone, she notices (not that she wants them anyway, since the electricity looks like it's been out in Stokes for days, too), but the canned foods are still there, in much more abundance than she would have previously expected. The sense of absurdity clings to her like a film of sweat on the back of her neck as she stacks her favorites in the basket, cans of ravioli and spaghetti, anything that can be easily cooked on a camping stove. She'll have to find one of those. Does Stokes have a sporting goods store? No matter, she decides, walking down the next aisle and hearing grit crunch beneath her feet. If it was an ordinary day, the floors would never have been allowed to get this filthy with road dust and stray leaves. Then again, on an ordinary day, the sweetly sick stench of decay wouldn't be lingering like fog either.

Liza nearly walks into him before she sees him. A man, sprawled out on the floor between the fruit snacks and the pop tarts. His arms are flung out to either side, and there's blood painted down his front. He's been stabbed, but she can see the dark swollen patches at his throat and under his eyes. He was a dead man walking anyway. By one out-flung hand is a half-opened package of beef jerky. Caught looting? It seems ridiculous that a man should be killed for beef jerky. Her eyes scan the nearby aisles, alert just in case. But the blood is old and dried, flies buzzing sluggishly over him. It's been a while.

She finishes faster than she plans, either way. There are more corpses, but none that have died quite so violently. The superflu caught up to the rest of them. The old woman crumpled on the floor between the Ensure and the vitamins, a pill bottle clasped in wrinkled, claw-like fingers. The teenager with headphones slung into her ears, blood and sputum a disgusting snow-drift on her chin. The little kid hits Liza the hardest. Dressed in cut-off red shorts and a striped shirt, the kid (boy? girl? Liza can't tell) sits slumped by the candy bars, head on their chest. It's like they could be sleeping, save for the cloud of flies and the sickly stench of rot. 

Her gorge rises and she's out of there, sneakers skidding on dirt and puddles of things she doesn't want to think about, nearly tripping over loose cans and discarded plastic bags. The air outside is sweet and fresh, and she drinks it in gratefully, steadfastly ignoring the corpses littered in the parking lot. Her bike is still there where she left it, and she takes the basket over to it, figuring out where she can put everything. She doesn't want to take the shopping basket, so she leaves it there, in the middle of a parking space. The bright red plastic mocks her.

The bike takes off again, but her enthusiasm has vanished, evaporating into the still, muggy air. Death itself seems to stalk the narrow streets and for a minute, Liza regrets leaving her own home. There were _people_ back there, there must have been. Real live people, not the bodies stacked like cordwood in the mortuary here, or fallen like broken legos in the streets. Rotting where they fell.

Then the moment passes and she pumps the pedals faster. It's time to find a place to stay for the rest of the summer. 


End file.
